The book at times had me so emotional, and at other times was bit of a drag. But strength of the powerful parts were good enough make the whole book a worthwhile read.
The parts on our protagonist and narrator's adolescence, where he experiences the continued bullying by fellow students is heart wrecking.
The descriptions of how him being different - in his walking, possibly talking etc., and how he had no one to turn to, in his painful discovery of himself, 40 years back, would give you a clear understanding why a bully shouldn't be tolerated. There are couple of stories of our narrator's school life (e.g. American Graffiti, It gets worse)."'I have nothing to give except myself and that doesn't seem to be enough.'
The guy who wrote the play, Tad Mosel, is gay, but I don't know this. He wrote Impromptu for his Yale classmates in 1949.
I still don't know anybody gay. Nobody openly gay, no one who identifies as gay. There is no such thing as 'identifying as gay'. I don't even know anyone who's been accused of being gay. You can only be accused of being gay and deny it. Nobody is gay. I don't even know if I'm guy." (from "It gets worse")
"I'm the high school homo. The boy who acts like a girl. I'm called a faggot every day. It starts in the morning when the school bus comes down Route 513, and the kids from Califon are already leaning out the windows two hundred yards away and screaming, 'Faggot!' At school, I'm pushed against lockers and punched in hallways and called a faggot on my way from one class to the next. When I get off the school bus at night, kids lean out the windows and scream, 'Faggot!' as the bus disappears out of sight" ( from "American Graffiti")
The second set of stories that I enjoyed were the ones which describe the last days of his friend, who died at the age of 38, from AIDS (e.g. Neorealism at the Infiniplex, Scenes from a marriage, It must be swell to be laying out dead, political funerals ).
"When Dave told me he had AIDS, the day we met, I liked him more. Creepy Fetish, dying men. Except it was 1989 in NYC, and the chance of meeting someone who didn't have AIDS, in that place and time - forgive the word - slim. And I hadn't kept anyone else alive, Maybe Dave. If he had five years, surely there'd be a cure..."
There was a time in the 80s, and the 90s, when a large section of the gay community, especially in New York, died of AIDS, since there was no medication to cure it, or control it. I was reminded of the lyrics of the Pet Shop Boys song, 'being boring' which refers to these many deaths.
Now I sit with different facesIn rented rooms and foreign placesAll the people I was kissingSome are here and some are missingIn the nineteen-ninetiesI never dreamt that I would get to beThe creature that I always meant to beBut I thought in spite of dreamsYou'd be sitting somewhere here with me
There had been political protests due to the inaction by the government towards research for a cure, and we see our narrator playing an active role in some of these protests."Release the drugs; AIDS won't wait", was one of the slogans.
The rest of the stories were on his post-Dave experiences, him spending his money to buy medicine for his AIDS infected close lovers (with no sex) etc. While these stories had there moments, they didn't come to the level of the first two categories of stories.
The short stories are all very well written, and most of them keep you engrossed, and revealing to you a period of the world's recent past, in which many suffered as a result of the essential human nature, that of being different, the necessity to love and of sex.
Highly recommended for lovers of modern English Fiction.
Rating: ****
